Good (or God) Removes the Bad, And Sometimes We’re Not Ready for It
We all have that one friend or relative who only knows how to get attention through hardship, sorrow, misadventure, misbehavior, or just straight up self-pity.
Heck, maybe we ARE that friend or relative.
The hardest part about getting with Good (or God) is how much our lives change for the better. It’s unclear what changes first. God (or Good) either changes our hearts or slowly impacts everything in our lives, and it doesn’t really matter if the chicken or the egg comes first, so long as both arrive.
But that also means the people around us accustomed to our darkness or hardship or self-destruction have to accept our new reality. Sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they choose to go.
What may be even more difficult for us is the fact that as we step into living in lighter, brighter, happier, better times, there will be those among us who are actively trying to drag us back to a darker place or more hardship.
It never occurred to me how many people were actively involved in causing me pain, until I sought healing for myself. Another person’s attention is a strange thing. Any kind of attention feels like something special when our internal core is in burning pain. But as that pain is assuaged by Good (or God) through work we do on ourselves, everything outside us changes, including what we need from others and how we need it.
I used to do a lot of attention seeking from negative sources. It was better than nothing. It was something other than the pain of being alone. It kept my mind occupied and my heart full of fantasies, which felt slightly better than misery.
Now that I like my life and my self and my path and I have hope for the future, that negative attention feels bad. I don’t like it or want it or seek it out. I avoid certain people, because I have finally started to see that their attention is harmful. Our interactions feel terrible, and I can see the false fantasy between us for what it is, rather than what I wish it could be.
Sometimes, we pray for help between us and someone else and we receive it in the form of healing and a better path forward together. Sometimes, that help comes in the form of someone seeing a change in us that they do not like, and they remove themselves. And sometimes, help arrives in a new perspective and the will to finally leave someone in darkness behind.
This last form of help is the slowest to unfold and only occurs when we’ve really connected with Good (or God). It is the hardest, because for a time we convince ourselves we can save them or help them or keep them, too.
We have to have enough faith to know that our future is bright and enough commitment to our own healing that we start to honor our own pain before we honor others. As difficult as it may be to leave another in darkness, we do not owe them our own opportunity to live in the light.